The Power of Katakana

apanese
language has a great capacity for absorbing foreign
words. We simply imitate the original pronunciation of a
foreign word by means of Katakana and utilize it as if it
had been a Japanese word from the beginning. For example,
the English word "card" is adopted as
and pronounced "kâdo" ("^" indicates
a long vowel sound). This way, we have imported many
words from various languages. This is one of the reasons
Japanese is considered to be a language with a very rich
and diverse vocabulary.

Interestingly, Japanese has
borrowed "card" from other languages, too. (karuta), the name of a Japanese card game
was coined from the Portuguese word "carta",
which simply means "card". Even Kanji
characters are assigned to this word. If one
says (karute), it refers to a card on which
doctors write down patients' pathology. This word is from
the equivalent German word "Karte". Many other
medical terms in Japanese are borrowed from German. The
French word "carte" is also used in the phrase (a ra karuto = à la carte).

Even one word from the same
language can be two words in Japanese. The English word
"strike" is one such example. (sutoraiki) means an industrial action,
whereas (sutoraiku) is a baseball term.
Such a pair of words is called a doublet in linguistic
parlance, like the words "hostel" and
"hotel" in English, both of which are from the
single French word "hôtel".

The word "driver"
is even more amazing. The corresponding Japanese word (doraibâ) means either a screwdriver or a
person who drives a car, depending whether it is
pronounced as "doraiBÂ" or
"doRAibâ" (with accents on
the capitalized parts). This distinction was probably
caused by the fact that screwdrivers were intruduced to
Japan when the English accent was not familiar to people.
Be careful, though. If you ask someone to pass you a (sukuryû doraibâ), a cocktail
will be served :-)

This ariticle is written
for the KonJa newsletter (winter '99).Copyright (c) 1999
KOJI UEDA. All rights reserved.